About

Silent Eyes is a walking simulator that focuses on the everyday life of a sickly writer in a contemporary setting. Unaware of his own circumstances, you play in the stead of the writer who also happens to be an avid streamer. The game is an experimental narrative experience, that attempts to ask the player questions about the playable character’s situation – rather than answer them.

Inspiration

The game is inspired by the movie ‘The Truman Show‘, a psychological satirical comedy-drama film directed by Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol. The film stars Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, a man who grew up living an ordinary life – unbeknownst to him – takes place on a large set populated by actors for a television show about him.

Since the game has a contemporary setting, it made most sense to try and hilight the possible dangers of online digital media, in particular, in-real-life streams (IRL Streams) which have risen in popularity over the last half-decade. This game is an effort to make the players question our (the stream viewers’) understanding of the situation if something were to go wrong.

Aims

My personal aim for this project was to craft a short compelling narrative experience about present day agendas that – unbeknownst to us – could plague our everyday lives. Live streams are a form of digital media that more and more people are beginning to consume as part of their everyday lives, while there have been cases of fraud and unacceptable behvaiour by both creators and viewers of popular live stream communities. I believe the worst is yet to come.

While working towards this end-goal, Unreliable Narration seemed like the most appropriate tool to achieve this desired outcome of leaving players potentially confused and questioning the dogma of the live streaming world. Considering this it only made sense that I perfom some research about Unreliable Narration and its utilisation in popular video games.

Research Outcome

The outcome of my research can be summarised as follows:

1. A ‘Narrator’ is a set of rules that governs the way in which different layers of narration (auditory, visual and interactive) work with each other to help the player make a mental image that represents the game world in their mind.
2. The ‘Narrator’ for a video game is not necessarily a personified agent within the game world.
3. ‘Unreliability’ can be exhibited to the player by the narrator by using discrepancies within the information obtainable to the player in the game;
   • Discrepancies may be manifested by feeding the player differing versions of the subject matter at hand (lore about the game world, some backstory about the player avatar, etc.)
   • The three modes, audio, visual and interactive, must be used in conjunction to support the unreliability the narrator is attempting to exhibit to the player.
   • The information imparted to the player by one mode, when contradicted by another beings to sow seeds of doubt within the players mind.
4. The narrator’s goal must not to be blatantly show the player how wrong their perception of the game world is. Rather, it is more effective to allow them to explore and gradually give them reasons to being questioning their view of the game world.

Collaboration

This game is an outcome of the collaboration between me and my classmate Shijie Song. His interest in narrative games and his research about ‘Lock and Key mechanics used to entice Player exploration’ was a suitable pairing for my preliminary ideas of a game that uses unreliable narration as a core mechanic.

We primarily conducted various discussions over summer break to remain on the same page about this project and then proceeded to implement an AGILE development plan for the project as we began production.

Development Cycle

Narrative

The first thing we focused on was making a solid narrative base for the game. The approach was to answer simple questions is an much detail as possible. Some of these questions were:

• Who are you playing as?
• Where are you?
• What is the player’s goal?

As we answered these questions and the questions that came about because of the answers, what we ended up with looked something like this;

As we spend more time building the character it helped us identify things such as, what are his hobbies, what kind of a person is he, what are his likes and dislikes and so on. The assortment of objects and their interactions and the space that the game would occur in were then decided based off of these details.

A final diagram to represent the characters in the game and their relations would be as follows:

Mechanics

Based off of our discussions over the summer and taking some time to play a variety of games listed below:

We decided that the following would be the core mechanics of our game:

• Interactable objects will be clearly differentiated with a highlight.

• The player can pick up and inspect objects present in the level.

• The player may find objects hidden inside inspectable objects.

• The player can interact with objects to change their state, for example: Lights or Locked Doors/Cupboards

• Players can keep items in their inventory and use them to retain information or as a piece of a puzzle elsewhere.

• Players will be prompted by the “Stream Chat”, with bits of information by the actions they take.
  This will be used to inform or misinform the player about the streamers persona and situation.

Interactions

As we had the basic mechanics decided and a list of possible objects for the player to interact with, while present in the space. We started to identify the minute details of these interactions, based off the the board categorization we had from the basic mechanics, here are a few examples of interactions we came up with:

Level Design

Once we had a list of mechanics and interactions for the player perform, we decided to look at the space these would be performed in. It made most sense that a sickly man being bamboozled into live streaming his whole life would be bound – by forces unkown to the player – to his house.

We initially looked up various floor plans for Victorian houses and meshed some of the ones we like together to make an initial floorplan for reference.

On further discussion we came to the conclusion that changing the space to an apartment would be more believeable and relatable to the player, as the game has a contemporary setting. This enticed us to divide the game into two primary spaces, the apartment itself and the reception area of the apartment complex.

Once we had implemented this layout for the spaces and had the initial part of the game ready, after some playtesting we found that there were two major issues with the spaces:

1. Players spend a lot of time travelling between rooms(spaces that housed most of the interactions within the game)
2. The layout wasn’t in-line with modern day apartments, making it harder for the player to percieve how and where to navigate to next.

For these reasons we eventually made a complete change in layout to account for these difficulties. The outcome was:

While this solved our initial problems with the design of the space and how the player would move across it. It made the end of the game – that occured in the reception area – very lack luster. The space was very open and the player could easily navigate across to important objects as they were all within eye-shot, this caused a lack of the investigative feeling the player would be used to while traversing the apartment looking for new things to interact with.

By adding some more walls and altering how the player would have to traverse to reach points of interest, we managed to have a final version of the layout for the level, that delievered the intended experience.

Level Flow

Once we had working versions for most of the players interactions and a greybox for the level layout, we used most of our time aside from development in crafting the level flow.

Some initial versions looked like this:

We were quiet infatuated with the idea of making each day the rather elaborate with a cetain number of tasks the player must complete to end the day, eventually falling into an almost unbreakable loop of events, unless the player is able to find and perform certain tasks in the correct order.

While this was an interesting idea, the further we got into development, we realised that for a variety of reasons, majorly the time required to make something of the scale would not allow us to produce a well crafted experience in the limited time we had. As a result we decided that the player would play through one version of a day in the streamers life. Exploring their surroundings and progressing by unlocking new spaces to explore finally revealing some facts that may lead to the truth – ideally the player questioning the turth of all the information he has obtained through the game.

To tie it all together the final bit was to meticulously design how the player would move through the space and in what order they would obtain the means to unlock futher areas.

The diagram above shows what important interactions are open to the player, in what part of the apartment/reception they are situated and what locked objects such as doors, cupboards or even computers could possibly be unlocked by the player at those points in the game.

On play testing this version of the game flow we realised that there were certain instances where the player may bypass certain tasks due to how and when other key objects necessary for the level flow were being made available to the player. To fix this issue we made an additional space in the form of a locked storage room that would then hold the key item the player were using to bypass certain parts of the game.

With the newer version, the player must now navigate through the rest of the level while performing the intended actions, to be able to go into the Storage room and obtain the key item necessary for progression.

Visual References & Assets

After playing some other games form the walking simulator and first person adventure genres; we had a good idea of what we wanted the final product to look like. Marie’s Room and What Reamins of Edith Finch, are our primary sources of inspiration for the same.

We scoured the unreal asset store, and other free 3D model websites, for assets that fit the bill and used Unreal Engines new lighting system to achieve the desired effects.

The final visual for our game looks like this:

Voice Acting

The voice acting for the game is done using a Text To Speech conversion tool.

The idea is that all the necessary prompts for the player who is also a viewer of the stream, is provided by the rest of the stream chat. Taking inspiration from popular streaming platforms using Text To Speech robots as a means to award viewers who donate money to streamers by playing their messages out loud, we turned every dialog in the game into a version said by the chatters.

Tools

Listed below are the variety of tools and softwares we used for the production of this game.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams primarily offers workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration.

As our University e-mails and commincations are well integrated with the Microsoft 365 platforms, this was an obvious choice for means of communication.

Miro

Miro is a whiteboarding platform that helps your team go beyond brainstorming, with a wide variety of tasks that require collaboration: workshopping, strategy mapping, Agile ceremonies, UX research and design, product development, customer discovery and process visualization.

Due to the freedom Miro gives the user while brainstorming, visualing and connecting ideas; it was one of the most prominent and important tools used to design and plan the game.

Unreal Engine 5.0

Unreal Engine is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games. While the engine was initially developed for first person shooters, it has since then been used in the development of a variety of genres of games, most notably for us ‘What Remains of Edith Finch‘ is a notable addition to the Walking Simulator genre made using this engine.

GitHub

GitHub is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features.

On account of the massive community support and extensive documentation available for GitHub, how to integrate with Unreal Engine and the simple nature of the workflow, we decided to utilise GitHub for the version control of our project.

Blender

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games.

Since we were primarily using assets available to us via the internet, to save the time necessary for making the same, every now and then assets wouldn’t be available exactly as we needed them. In times like these Blender was very useful for making any necessary alterations to the assets so they may fit our needs.

Audacity

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems. It has a variety of tools that help with audio processing making it a good pairing for any changes we needed to make for our Text To Speech generated narration.

Voicemaker

Voicemaker is a Text To Speech (TTS) conversion service provided by the company of the same name. As it was the most robust and freely available Text To Speech conversion tool that required no setup on the user-end, it was a great choice for our Text To Speech needs.

Play Testing

The Playtest for this project ocurred mainly in three stages;

In the first stage we mainly play tested the interactions and player controls – the goal was to see if players were comfortable with the controls for the interactions and were able to perform them seamlessly multiple times. This is the stage where we made changes like:

• Players need not visit the inventory to use an item, such as needing to use a key to unlock the door.
• Players are provided prompts when Items are Added to their Inventory
• Players need not interact twice for compound actions, such as unlocking then opening a drawer.

In the second stage we play tested the players progression through the game. This is the stage where we identified issues with our version of the level layout and level flows. The major changes as a result of the playtest were as follows:

• Changes to the Floor plan of the apartment and the reception area to make movement through spaces faster, yet retain the sense of exploration and investigative nature of the game
• Addition of a Subtitle System for the dialogue
• Additional lighting to hlep highlight important objects or points of interest within the scene
• Addition of Cut Scenes at the Start, Middle and End of the game to better explain the plot
• Vartiety of Bug Fixes, both for those that blocked progression and deminished the player experience

In the third and final stage we were mostly testing for the stability of the project as a whole and for performance across a range of available devices.

The periodic and rigorous play testing provided us with great feedback that both helped us fix/better the player experience along with proving us with important information about the players experience vs the intended experience.

Conclusion

The most recent version of the game implements focuses on two major pillars;

First, the lock and key mechanism used to gate the progress of the player through the level.

Second, the unreliability of the narration that occurs due to the discrepencies between what the players might see while interacting with the various interactable objects spread around the level and what the stream chat tells them about the streamer and their persona.

I believe using my research as a guideline to implement the ‘narrator’ as a set of rules that governs how the game reacts to the player interactions with it was a success. As players in the beginning were choosing to believe what the chat tells them and take it all at face value, but upon finding possible hints around the level, that questioned their credibility; players were more cautios towards the chats comments and made an effort to explore the house further to see if there was anything they had missed on acount of following chat’s instructions.

Overall I’m quiet satisfied with the final state of the game. We were able to achieve most if not all of our intended milestones; visually, mechanically and eventually even the game flow all went according to plan. The regular play testing helped greatly to refine the experience and achieve the intended results.